Tim Byles, chief executive of a quango responsible for an axed £55bn initiative to rebuild the country's schools, told MPs he had warned Gove's office to check his facts before telling hundreds of schools whether their new buildings would go ahead.

But he said that Gove's staff disregarded this, and published a list earlier this month that was found to have 25 errors.

On reading the list, schools celebrated the news that their new buildings were to go ahead only to discover, later in the day, that their rebuilding projects had been binned. Many teachers and local authorities had spent several years and millions of pounds negotiating the plans. Gove was forced to apologise in the Commons.

But Byles told the cross-party Commons education select committee that when Gove asked him to collect information for the list, he had explained to him that his quango only had data relating to schools that were in the advanced stages of obtaining a new building.

"I told [Gove's] department that they should check with local authorities, but this advice was not followed," he said. "We advised that it would be better to validate the data."

However, he admitted that his quango was responsible for errors that resulted in schools in Sandwell, West Midlands, thinking their building plans were going ahead when they had in fact been scrapped.

"We had people working 24 hours a day for three weeks to compile the list," he told MPs. "But that was our mistake."

Earlier this month, Gove cancelled the Building Schools for the Future (BSF) initiative started under the previous government, because he said it had been hit by "massive overspends, tragic delays, botched construction projects and needless bureaucracy".

Byles accused Gove of misinforming the public about BSF. Gove told the Commons last month that, under the initiative, schools had to "measure the distance between cycle racks before they could go ahead with construction [of a new school]. Unless [the measurement] was between 600mm and 1 metre, the school could not be built."

He said: "It is that sort of absurd, pettifogging, centralising bureaucracy that we need to sweep away so that money goes where it needs to go – towards the frontline."

But Byles said there were no such rules on cycle racks. "There isn't enforced guidance on cycle racks, as it is sometimes said," he told MPs, adding that he dealt "in the matter of facts" and was "committed to truth and fairness".

Byles admitted that BSF had come up against problems of bureaucracy and waste, but said this was the fault of European Union rules on procurement. He said money was wasted on commissioning several designs for a new building to ensure local authorities had options to choose from.

This means designs are "fully worked up and then put in the bin", Byles said. "Much of the regulation is completely out of our control – it is European regulations."

But Byles said many schools, such as Oxclose community school in Sunderland, had dramatically improved their results because, in part, of a new building. The proportion of Oxclose's pupils achieving A* to C grades in five GCSEs including English and maths has shot up from 19% to 60% in two years.